The Game

parts of the puzzle about in my mind. Would Holmes use the syringe and drug his guard as soon as darkness fell, or would he wait until after the maharaja’s midnight matinee? He had no way of knowing that, with the current turmoil, the call might never come. In which case, how long after midnight would he wait, before having to risk the dawn? No, better if I ventured again into the prison fortress and brought him out. Nesbit would simply have to watch his own back.

My tobacco had burnt itself out; Nesbit ground his out under his boot and said, “It’s possible he’s forgotten —oop. Spoke too soon.”

The clamour from the monkey-cage rose as they spotted someone coming down the path. We stood to see, over the roofs of the stable; in a moment I could make out three men, the first bareheaded, the two taller figures behind him topped with red puggarees. The monkeys screamed and bounced around their trees wildly, the men came down the path, and then the three stopped, directly adjacent to the high, noisy cage.

The maharaja seemed to be speaking to his two guards, although at this distance, I could not even make out the gestures, just that they had stopped and were facing each other. Then the smaller man flung his right arm out at the monkey-cage, and one of the guards seemed to move slightly back, the sun briefly glinting off the barrel of the rifle he carried. I saw his free hand, too, raise up in a weak gesture, and then the maharaja stepped forward, snatched the long gun, and brought it down, butt first, in the guard’s face. The red puggaree staggered back; the maharaja brought the rifle to his shoulder and pivoted ninety degrees towards the cage. The barrel spat flame, and the sound of a shot rolled across the landscape, startling the lake birds into sudden flight. A dark shape dropped from its high perch, and the other monkeys went crazy. A second shot flashed and sounded; with the third, terror sent the creatures cowering into the corners, silent at last. The maharaja flung the gun back at its owner and continued on down the hill.

“Christ Jesus,” Nesbit murmured into the shocked air. The three men disappeared behind some trees, and Nesbit set off for the stables at a run.

The stable-hands were furiously tightening girths and polishing saddles, their faces pale and taut, when their lord and master swept into the yard with the two armed guards on his heels, one with blood streaming from his smashed nose, the other gripping his gun with white knuckles. The maharaja marched straight over to the white stallion; the syce ran for the mounting block, but he was too slow, and received a kick from the spurred boots for his delay.

Up in the saddle, kerbing the stallion with hard hands, our host glared down at us, his face terrible in scorn and rage. “My ancestors ruled this land when yours were squatting in grass huts picking for lice,” he shouted. “My father and grandfather made treaties with the British Crown, and we have remained loyal to those treaties. And now your government thinks it can summon me—me, the king of Khanpur—to stand before them like a schoolboy answering for his petty crimes. They threaten me—threaten! With what? Next they will be sending men to spy upon me. I swear, before that happens I will disembowel their stinking sudra of a Viceroy and leave him for the vultures.”

I was more than prepared to dive for cover, but my companion was made of the stuff that had built an Empire. Nesbit stood his ground as the horse jittered and turned under its enraged rider, and even took a step forward into range of those spurred boots, looking up at his friend.

“Jimmy,” he said, and, “Your Highness. What has happened? I don’t understand. Tell me what has happened.”

“A letter! From London, telling me—not asking, telling!—that I am to report to Delhi immediately to answer questions concerning some damnable woman. What woman, I ask? Who am I to care if my neighbour has lost one of his daughters?”

It suddenly became a lot clearer: The complaint of the neighbouring nawab had percolated upwards, and hit the sensitive place of England’s new regime. I cursed under my breath, and knew Nesbit would curse too. The timing could not have been worse for a display of the Socialists’ determination to treat all its citizens near and far with an equal hand.

“Jimmy, it’s the new government, you know?” Nesbit said in soothing tones. “New boys, they mean well, but they haven’t a clue as to how things are done, and are stumbling around stepping on toes right and left. Look, I’ll go back to Delhi immediately and straighten it out. Honestly, think no more about it. I’ll talk to the CinC—he knows me, he knows you’ve been a loyal friend to Britain, he’ll hear me out.”

The prince hauled himself back from the edge, but his now-stifled rage sharpened into a look of calculation, even cruelty, and he interrupted Nesbit’s ongoing explanation of the delicacies inherent in a change of governments.

“This is an insult to my very blood. You have been my friend, Nesbit, but you are first and foremost one of them. And your friend here.” The look he gave me was enough to curl my toes. “I invite his sister to share at my table and my sport, and the woman gets it into her head that she must leave, and walks away from my hospitality without even an as-you-please. I long thought the English had some sense of honour, or at least manners. I find now you have neither. You people imagine that you rule here in Khanpur. I tell you, Nesbit: You do not.” He spat out the three words like bullets. “I rule Khanpur; I and I alone. I invited you here; I am prepared to disinvite you. But before you go, you will take today with you, and—by God!—it will give your English government something to think about. Mount and come, both of you.”

He whirled the stallion on its haunches and kicked it into a gallop, its hooves sliding dangerously over the stones of the yard. Nesbit and I climbed more reluctantly into our saddles and followed at a more sedate gait; as we left the yard, the two armed guards were shouting at the syces to bring up their two bays.

“What do you suppose he has in mind?” I asked Nesbit as we trotted along the dusty road. “Panthers? His pet African lions?”

“I suppose we should be glad he didn’t just have his men tie us up between two elephants.”

He looked glum, but the thought of that sort of punishment made the breakfast go queasy in my stomach. “You don’t think . . .”

“That he’s going to do us in? No, I don’t think he’s that mad. Besides which, he seems to have in mind more of a demonstration. Or a contest—yes, that may be it.”

“Whatever it is, for God’s sake let him win.”

“I’ll do my best. But I shouldn’t think that doing so openly would be a good idea. Having a rival deliberately throw a game could well be the match that lit the charge.”

I could see that, and I reflected, not for the first time, that those who had decreed that British boys grow up playing demanding games had a lot to answer for.

“Perhaps it’s time just to tell him who we are.”

Nesbit screwed up his face and shook his head, more in doubt than in disagreement. “We may have to. But I’d rather keep that as a last resort. That, too, might be the spark that drove him to violence, to think that a friend was now spying on him—you heard what he said about spies. The other princes would probably feel much the same—a lot of uncomfortable questions would be asked if they thought they might be the object of surreptitious surveillance. No, none of them would like it one bit.”

We rode for an hour, into the open land where we had ridden after pig on the first day. My exhaustion retreated with the exercise, the clean air clearing my head, the horse’s eager energy proving contagious. I had no wish to pit myself against some deadly animal while armed with nothing but a sharp stick, but if the maharaja was determined to do so in order to prove Khanpur’s superiority over the effete Brits, so be it. I had a gun that would give pause to anything smaller than an elephant, and a horse under me that could outrun most predators.

All in all, although I was not pleased with how the day was turning out, it could have been worse. The maharaja might, as Nesbit said, have thrown us into the cell next to Holmes’, or had us executed outright. Or he could have come up with some kind of competition that would have proved instantly disastrous for Martin Russell, such as wrestling or employing the more primitive skills of the nautch girls. With any luck, he would merely rub our noses in our inferiority and throw us out of the kingdom, leaving us no worse off than we had been yesterday night. Yes, there remained the problem of retrieving Holmes, but as Holmes himself had said, he need only stand up and publicly declare himself an eccentric English magician, and the maharaja would have no choice but to allow him to leave.

With any luck.